Detective
After a quiet holiday at a secluded hotel on the island of Mallorca, our Data Detective has returned to his duties. His first night back at his flat he is sent an inquiry regarding a most unusual QuickBooks error:
LVL_ERROR: Verify Online Account Information: Invalid Customer ID number --> Record = 69
Now the natural tendency would be to assume that the word ‘Customer’ used in the log refers to an actual ‘Customer’ within the QuickBooks customer table. We might also assume that the ‘online account’ reference was referring to a customer’s credit card number that might be used for on-line charges via merchant services. This is clearly one place where Intuit has not done enough work in expanding the ‘information’ provided in the QBWin.log file.
Working down the list of options using differential ‘diagnosis’, our Data Detective begins by reviewing the QuickBooks ‘customer’ records. Because you cannot see the corresponding Internal Reference (record) ID numbers for customers from inside QuickBooks, you might think to export the Customer table using the iiF feature so that you could identify the customer in question.
That seems simple enough, but in this case you wouldn’t find the customer. For one reason the entire QuickBooks file didn’t even contain 69 different customer records even when the ‘inactive customers’ were included; in fact the Data Detective would find out that in this specific case there were fewer than 10 total customers. Furthermore none of the Customers had any credit card numbers, so that couldn’t be what the QBWin.log was referencing when it mentioned Online Account. So what could this ‘Customer’ reference possibly mean?
Well the next clue is found at the beginning of the error message, “Verify Online Account” and sure enough there is another type of record that has ‘online account’ data, and that is a Bank Account. You could also export the Chart of Accounts list using the iiF Export to find the specific ‘account’ with reference ID 69, but unless you have a large number of ‘bank accounts’, and all of them have been set-up for on-line banking, it is pretty simple to manually track down which account is the offender.
In some cases the lightning bolt typically associated with an on-line linked bank account may be missing, but in other cases it will still be present. But if you open up the on-line banking settings under each account you should soon discover which account is missing critical information. QuickBooks may display a similar message to that in the QBWin.log saying, “Verify Online Account Information” the moment you access the account.
In these cases the internal QuickBooks records of your electronic banking ‘identification’ have either been lost or corrupted, and as a result QuickBooks cannot properly connect to your bank do to a lack of essential ‘identity’ information. You may have to enter your Customer ID (login) associated with your on-line banking account and/or password, or in some cases simply confirm the information that already appears. Once you perform this step, QuickBooks will normally connect to your bank and verify the on-line identification, if it passes, everything has been re-set properly as was the case for this client. A subsequent run of the Verify utility came up clear of any errors.
Returning to his flat, our Data Detective was able to track down his case notes on a similar occurrence which wasn’t nearly as easily resolved as the case of today. It appeared in that case that a corruption of the bank account table fields associated with the on-line account would not permit the on-line account to be reconfigured. In that case the Data Detective set-up a brand-new bank account in QuickBooks, and then merged the old bank account into the new bank account so that the history was brought into the new bank account. Once that was completed, he then set-up on-line banking for the new account linked to the client’s actual ‘bank’ account. (Of course, you must always remember to make a complete back-up of your QuickBooks file before ever making any repairs of this type.)
As our Data Detective curled up in front of his fireplace with his cup of Café a lait he thought to himself, “isn’t a holiday supposed to refresh you and your mind?” It seems that his time spent in the Balearic Islands off the cost of Spain may have not be so clearing for his ‘little gray cells’ after all; obviously a case of ‘too much sun’, but that’s a case for another day as far as the Data Detective is concerned.
Editor’s note: My thanks go out to Stacey Byrne for submitting the case documentation that led to this episode of ‘The Data Detective’.